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Congratulations to the 2010 Pi Day Bake-Off Winners

Posted by Erin Zimmer, Mar 19, 2010

All the votes have been tallied, and it's time to announce the winners of the 2010 Pi Day Bake-Off we co-sponsored with the good folks of ScienceBlogs. Was it easy as pie? Oh, definitely not. There were too many ridiculously clever and tasty-looking entries, but with the most popular votes, the winner of $314.16 is Claudette's One-Hundred-Digit Berry Pie. Cutting out 100 digits of pi from pie crust was apparently worth it! Though I'm sure it didn't seem that way when she was only on ...27950288... (the third row). Congrats, Claudette!

"Trying to come up with an idea for the pie, I thought about what pi means and how it helps us—calculating the circumference of a circle or a sphere, surface area, and also, how cute is that symbol? Here in the studio, we wanted to make a play on area, the result of our favorite pi equation (πr²). Are there any famous areas? Area 51! We could make a pie with 51 sq inches of delicious surface area. With our handy calculation (thank you pi), the diameter needed to be 8.05824". Next though, what should be in the pie? Something aliens would like, right?! Not knowing what they eat, I googled "what do aliens eat?" Unfortunately, most people think they eat humans, light, or nothing. Needless to say I kept searching until I came a cross a synopsis of the 1989 show UFO Coverup Live. Supposedly, they (the aliens) like Strawberry Ice Cream! Perfect!

All of the runners-up will win a "Simple as 3.141592" t-shirt from mental_floss. Thank you to everyone who entered this year's contest—they were all so impressive and made us want to eat our computer screens (and think about our high school geometry teachers?). And thanks to ScienceBlogs for helping us combine the wonderful worlds of pie and irrational numbers.

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